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Monday, September 9, 2013

Heaven or Hell - A Crucial Question

Heaven or Hell – A Crucial Question (Revelation 21:3-4)

Author
Rebecca Price Janney begins her book about the way Americans think about the
afterlife by looking at Mother Teresa and Princess Diana who died around the
same time. At the British embassy in WashingtonDC,
someone set up a large placard that read, “The angels rejoice for heaven
welcomes Princess Diana and Mother Teresa.”
A decade later at a concert in Princess Diana’s honor, the performer
proclaimed she was “up there” listening.[i]

How
does he know Heaven is “up there?” How
does he know Princess Diana is in Heaven?
How does he know she is spending her there listening to his
concert? How does he know Princess Diana
is in Heaven at all? Or Mother Teresa
for that matter.

How dare you
question her credentials! Look at all the good she did, all the people
helped. But wait! Don’t we say salvation by grace? We
receive it. We don’t earn it. How could Mother Teresa earn something that
can’t be earned? If anyone deserves Heaven, she does.
Oh? Doesn’t it say in Romans,
all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (3:23)?

Why would the
person who made the placard put Princess Diana in the same category as Mother
Teresa?

Janney
in her book also quotes a New York
City firefighter.
Many of his buddies died on September 11, 2001. He said, “Heaven has some fire department
now.” Not a one of us would begrudge his
feelings. We say such things when
someone we admire or love dies.

But stepping
back from it, we have to ask, did he do any kind of assessment of the spiritual
condition of his friends in the fire department? Or do we just say they deserve Heaven because
they sacrificed themselves?

I
have been at funerals where the deceased was someone who did not participate in
church and had not for decades. The
deceased cursed and drank, was crabby and mean, and showed no reverence for
God. At the coffin, one of his old
friends standing by wipes his eyes and says, “Well, at least he’s in a better
place.” What is the basis for saying
that?

Janney
writes, “Contemporary Americans tend to believe that all people go to Heaven
and view the idea of Hell as repugnant.
There is a general assumption that unless someone was a child
pornographer, racist, drug lord, or terrorist he or she will go to Heaven.” Then Janney writes in parentheses, “Of course
child pornographers, racists, drug lords, and terrorists also believe they are
going to Heaven.”[ii] Is there more to go on than what we feel and
what hope?

Some
in the church see it in black and white.
A friend of mine told of a funeral where he was one of the
pall-bearers. As they others carried the
casket toward the burial site, the officiating pastor said, “He is in
Hell. He did not believe in Jesus and
now he is in Hell.”[iii]

In
critical debates among theologians the most commonly held view of Hell going
back to the earliest times of Christianity is summarized as eternal conscious
torment inflicted and maintained by God.
That serves as a default position, but it is not the only view.

Pastor and
author Rob Bell has an issue with this notion of Hell. On the book jacket of his 2011 book Love Wins is the following quote. “God love us.
God offers us everlasting life by grace, freely, through no merit on our
part … unless you do not respond the right way.
Then God will torture you forever in Hell.” Huh?

Bell’s phrase ‘respond the right way’ means offering some form of
confession that we are sinners, Jesus died for us, and we receive the
forgiveness and salvation from him, because of his death on the cross. Failure
to make a Christian confession lands one in Hell, eternally tortured by
God. Bell finds this unacceptable. How can the God of love sentence nonbelievers
to eternal misery in Hell? Bell does not believe God
does things that way.

And
yet, eternal, conscious torment is the traditional Christian perspective. It is either Heaven or Hell. They are places. To go Heaven and avoid Hell, we need to
confess our faith in Jesus. If we don’t,
then when we die, a pastor lacking sensitivity may stand at the head of our
casket, point, and say, “He’s in Hell.
She’s in Hell.” If the
traditional doctrine of Hell is correct, then this pastor is speaking the
truth. But, even if the traditional
doctrine is not right, one thing is certain.
All of us die. Every single one
of us dies.

What happens then? Would you like to have legitimate hope that
you exist beyond death and your existence beyond death is positive? And what about friends, people we love who
are not in Church, who are not Christians?
They die too. What happens to those not following Jesus?

We
need help in this conversation. List to
Revelation 20:12-15.

Revelation,
20:11-15.

12 And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the
throne, and books were opened. Also another book was opened, the book of life.
And the dead were judged according to their works, as recorded in the books.13 And the sea gave up the dead that were in it, Death and Hades
gave up the dead that were in them, and all were judged according to what they
had done.14 Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This
is the second death, the lake of fire;15 and anyone whose name was not found written in the book of
life was thrown into the lake of fire.

The Bible says something happens; we are judged according to our
works. All people are sinners and God absolutely hates sin. In the book of Genesis, God rains fire from
heaven and consumes two immoral cities – Sodom
and Gomorrah. That’s how God feels about sin. God is depicted as a God of love in the
Bible, but God is also a God of wrath.
That is unmistakable.

However,
all who are in Christ are declared righteous.
Our sins are forgiven and no longer count against us. So when Revelation says the dead will be
judged according to their works, we keep in mind that Jesus’ followers are
judged according to Jesus’ works.

All
the dead of human history– billions of people - are gathered. The book of life is opened, the names are
read. Death and Hades are thrown into a
lake of fire. These conditions will no
longer exist. In the eternal Kingdom
of God’s death will be a
meaningless word because the concept will have been consumed in the lake of
fire. But not only death. Verse 15:
“Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life is thrown
into the lake of fire.”

What is it
like in that lake of fire? Some
theologians insist it means you’re consumed forever, annihilated. That’s what fire does. Others insist that the fire is metaphor and
you’ll be awake for eternity suffering as badly as if you constantly felt the
burn of flames on your flesh. A third
position is that that the fire purifies.
All the corruption is burned off, one comes out clean, and then finds
his name in the book of life.

In this
series, we will look more at these three doctrines of Hell – Annihilationist,
Eternal Torment, and Refining which leads all people to salvation. For now, we simply acknowledge that all
people die. And all people, per
Revelation, go through the judgment.
Death itself ends up in a lake of fire. And those not written in the
book of life do too.

In his letter
to the church in Thessalonica, the Apostle Paul addresses the issue of death to
those who are followers of Jesus. The
Thessalonians were sure of eternal life with God in Christ. Notice I am not saying they necessarily
thought they’d go to Heaven when they died.
The concept of Heaven many have been taught in Churches is not exactly
what the New Testament emphasizes. In
the New Testament we read more about living eternally. The Thessalonians thought that because Jesus
has risen from death they would never die.

What we are
actually promised is we will join him in resurrection. Only dead people are resurrected. When members started dying, the Thessalonians
suffered a devastating crisis of faith.
Some of their brothers died, and Jesus had not come back. What did it mean?

Paul writes
in 1st Thessalonians 4:13.

13 But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and
sisters,[g]about
those who have died,[h]so that
you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.14 For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so,
through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.[i]15 For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we
who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means
precede those who have died.[j]16 For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the
archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven,
and the dead in Christ will rise first.17 Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the
clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with
the Lord forever.18 Therefore encourage one another with these words.

Paul
lays out the entire plan. First, when we
grieve our beloved after they have died, our grief is soaked in hope. Jesus, the Resurrected One, will “bring with
him those who have died.” There will be
the archangel’s call and the sound of God’s trumpet. Then, the Lord descends from Heaven. The dead in Christ rise. People who died centuries ago are
reconstituted in resurrected bodies and rise to Christ. Can we picture this? When we get to end of verse 17, Heaven has
come to us. The promise on which we
stand is that we are with Jesus forever.

Why
did Paul write this? So the believers who faced death could encourage one
another. He thought the best thing he
could tell them, of all the truths he could share, was they would be with Jesus
forever.

Hell
is horrifying. I feel myself a character
in horror movie. I feel every awful
thing in my bones and I cannot get out.
When that foreboding begins to wash over me, I retreat to the Gospel.

That’s
what Paul is telling us to do. Trust in Jesus.
The faith we have in Him assures us we will be with him. Whatever Heaven is like, however different
than we have maybe been taught to believe, the promise is we will be with
Jesus. The only way our discussion of
this topic will be spiritually healthy and helpful is if we trust in Him. We trust Him with our future and our
present.

Some
believers think the threat of Hell is the best way to motivate nonbelievers to
consider turning to Jesus, but not me.
For me, the promise of life with Christ is the drive for sharing
faith. That life begins when one turns
to Jesus and continues when we die and then enter the resurrection.

When
we conclude this series on the afterlife, it will be fine with me if you don’t
hold all the same theological positions as I do. Whether you and I agree or disagree on
doctrines of Heaven and Hell, I believe your life and mine will be utterly
blessed today – not only in a distant afterlife but also today, right now when
we learn how to live in complete trust. We trust Jesus with our very lives and
in the smallest bits of our lives and in every bit of our lives.

In
that we begin to understand and live in the world described in Revelation
21. There, John sees into Heaven.

3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

“See, the
home[a]of God is among mortals.He will dwell[b]with them;they will be
his peoples,[c]and God himself
will be with them;[d]4 he will wipe every
tear from their eyes.Death will be
no more;mourning and
crying and pain will be no more,for the first things
have passed away.”

5 And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making
all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and
true.”6 Then he
said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the
end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of
life.

If we are in
Christ, forever begins today. The more
we trust Him, follow and serve Him, and love in His name, the truer our
experience of Him with us becomes and the clearer our picture of Heaven
is. It will be familiar even before we
get there because we have been walking with Him all along.

AMEN

[i]
Rebecca Price Janney (2009), Who Goes
There: A Cultural History of Heaven and Hell, p.9.